Fifty-two years after giving the sexist, hard-gambling Bobby Riggs a piglet before tennis’s first “Battle of the Sexes”, Billie Jean King recently fronted the $50m (£37.5m) 10-year sponsorship deal for women’s tennis with Mercedes – a sign of how far she has travelled since Riggs told interviewers he liked Tarzan, Rudolph Valentino and Henry VIII because “they all knew how to handle their women”.
The piglet represented Riggs’s chauvinism: a role he played with relish, in part because of ingrained condescension to women, but also because he knew how box offices work. The polarity of Riggs the sexist and King the campaigner for equal pay for women drew 30,000 to the Houston Astrodome for the match and 90 million TV viewers around the world.
Riggs arrived on court on a rickshaw accompanied by six “Bosom Buddies”. King appeared on an Egyptian litter carried by toga-wearing men. Riggs kept his “Sugar Daddy” jacket on for the first three games. When the high camp was over, King won in straight sets and collected $100,000. Riggs, who was later suspected in an ESPN investigation of throwing the match to appease mob contacts, said: “Billie Jean beat me fair and square.”
From there it wouldn’t take much to raise the dignity bar for Battle of the Sexes II. Yes, the stunt is back, for the digital age, in “The Dubai Showdown” on Sunday in the Coca-Cola Arena between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios, who happen to be represented by the same talent agency, Evolve, which Sabalenka joined from IMG this year.
Stuart Duguid, who runs that tennis stable, said in a 2023 interview: “The key to letting athletes be authentic is – let them be themselves, rather than try and manufacture something.”
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Duguid seems to have changed his mind about manufactured spectacles. The Dubai Showdown is nothing if not contrived. And the BBC is on board with it. Sabalenka v Kyrgios will be shown live by Britain’s national broadcaster. Its logic might be that the Dubai face-off is closer to light entertainment than the all-out gender war of 1973, when King said of the match: “It represents equality, it represents freedom, it represents equal pay for equal work – I knew I had to win.”
But the contest itself is being tinkered with to reduce Kyrgios’s strength and speed advantage: a gesture of fairness, or a dilution that defeat the purpose of testing men against women in typical conditions?
‘It’s so obvious that the man is stronger than the woman, but it’s not about that’
Aryna Sabalenka, world No 1
The exhibition match will be best of three sets, with a 10-point tiebreaker if required. The BBC says the court will be altered to nullify the 9% speed advantage held by men. Sabalenka’s side of the court will therefore be 9% smaller: a rather arbitrary rebalancing of gender difference. Each will serve only once per point – again to weaken Kyrgios’s edge. His highest serve speed is 143mph. Sabalenka has clocked 133mph. “It’s so obvious that the man is biologically stronger than the woman, but it’s not about that,” says Sabalenka.
King is the common thread between the Houston caper and the Christmas show the BBC will broadcast on Sunday. She set up the Women’s Tennis Association when females were earning a fraction of men’s prize money and airtime. Announcing the WTA’s Mercedes deal earlier this month, King said: “From the day we founded the WTA, our mission was to ensure that every girl, every woman, could have a place to compete, be recognised for her accomplishments and make a living playing the sport she loves.”
Asked by the BBC if version two is true to version one, King said: “The only similarity is that one is a boy and one is a girl. That’s it.
Everything else, no. Ours was about social change; culturally, where we were in 1973. This one is not.”
In May 1973, the 55-year-old Riggs thrashed Margaret Court in what was billed as the “Mothers’ Day Massacre”. He then pestered King for a game so he could improve on his $10,000 for beating Court.
A Wimbledon and US Open champion, Riggs was also a huckster and showman whose own autobiography referred to him as “great athlete and super conman”.
He ran side hustles in golf, ping pong, dominoes, pool, craps, backgammon, gin rummy and marbles. In one game he received serve sitting down. A Sports Illustrated cover warned: “Never bet against this man” – which Riggs hated, because it put people off betting against him.
Kyrgios is a “character” but not in Riggs’s league. He has been feeling for a role that adds spice to the Dubai circus without reviving the confrontational spirit of Riggs, who said “women belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order”.
“When the world No 1 challenges you, you answer the call. I’ve got massive respect for Aryna; she’s a powerhouse and a true champion,” said Kyrgios in the Dubai press release. But his position is complicated by a guilty plea for assaulting an ex-girlfriend in 2023, with the magistrate calling it “a single act of stupidity or frustration”. And by his distancing himself last year from the “influencer” Andrew Tate, after sharing one of his posts.
The Evolve agency derby pits the 27-year-old women’s world No 1 and four-time grand slam title winner against a volatile and voluble 30-year-old who played only five matches in 2025 and is now ranked 673rd. Kyrgios has the talent to trouble the game’s best players but has been held up by a wrist injury.
He says he hopes their handshake at the end “solidifies the union between males and females in the tennis world”. Even Riggs came to feel he had been part of something useful. King stayed in touch with him and spoke to him the day before he died, when he told her he loved her and said: “We did make a difference, didn’t we?”
Photograph by Tony Triolo/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images